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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

The US (lack of) class system…

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Ok, this is a gripe and somewhat political; fair warning.

My son has a VSD, a ventricular septal defect. It’s a tiny hole in his heart wall, not growing, so the doctors say “don’t operate”, and he’s perfectly (almost obnoxiously :) healthy. Our insurance provider, however, says that unless we cut into his healthy body, they won’t cover him. They have to, actually, because of HIPAA (thankfully). BUT, they won’t cover him under our family plan (which has gone up 400% in the past 4 years), and we have to have a second, separate, and much less coverage policy for him.

This makes him, effectively, a second class citizen.

As an independent consultant, I can’t get small business insurance where a plan would have to cover the whole family (and can’t just employ my wife to qualify). So let me be clear that I’m for the US to move to a one not-for-profit medical insurance system, nationally. Don’t tell me it doesn’t work, because I lived in Australia for seven years where they have it and it works. It’s not perfect, but it’s bloody well better than our system here in terms of coverage for everyone. And of course you should’ve seen the results that show the US system is worst and most expensive of the major countries. Scandalous.

I’m a bit dismayed that the major candidates’ plans aren’t willing to go this far. And, by and large, their plans won’t help my health care costs. Given that the forecasts are for more independent workers, this should be of more concern.

The alternative would be a regular job, but so far no one’s come through with an offer that affords me the level of contribution I can and want to make. So, anyone want an ‘on call’ elearning expert for the cost of health, disability, and retirement benefits for me and my family?

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Requirements to do a web biz ‘play’

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Guy Kawasaki spoke at Xerox PARC yesterday, on How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09. He’s an entertaining speaker, and he had a very interesting point.

As background, he was Apple’s Evangelist, and then started a venture capital fund (Garage Technology). He recently chaired a panel of guys talking about how they built web businesses on the cheap and were making millions of dollars (in advertising), which got him thinking, and so he took a shot at it. He told how he got the site up and running, but of course he cashed in a lot of favors that he’d built over the years so it’s not clear anyone could do it for $12K.

However, it was clear that it’s not that much more. Say, on the order of tens of thousands of dollars (or, for those nerds among us, O($10K)), you could make a web play, even if you can’t program. That’s a far cry from the several million he gets pitches for in his role of VC. And that’s the real point. If it’s a lot cheaper to take a shot, then a lot more shots will be taken, and we’ve a very dynamic environment. Sure, there may be a lot of dreck (he talked about his site was called the ‘worst website ever’, which he loved since it drove huge traffic), but some good should come out.

By the way, if we take Pine & Gilmore seriously on the transformation economy, learning ‘experience’ sites could be big. Which might have been what Paul Saffo was saying to the eLearning Guild audience at DevLearn about their promising position. So, I’m getting my project ready. How about you?

Clive on resources vs instruction

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That may not be how he’d think of it, but Clive Shepherd’s got a post about whether to provide well-structured learning solutions (using a balanced meal metaphor) or a suite of resources (I think of a buffet to extend the metaphor). My suggestion is to have the buffet, with some support on choosing a balanced meal. That is, don’t assume the learner’s good at self-learning, but don’t force them into a cookie-cutter solution either.

Why don’t we spend more effort on helping learners acquire self-learning skills? It seems such an obviously valuable investment that Jay Cross and I spent some time carrying the torch and still feel it’s valuable (he’s got a whole chapter on it in his Informal Learning book). If you don’t, I reckon you’re not equipping your workers for ultimate success. It’s like leaving money on the table.

Neural meta-learning

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Getting my PhD where they arguably started the field of cognitive science, I got exposed to philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience as well as psychology. One of the blogs I like to follow is Eide Neurolearning, and in their most recent post, they talk about complex thinking. The take-home I’m fascinated by is this:

Maybe basic skill sets for schooling should not be thought of as the 3 R’s (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic), but rather beyond the memorization of facts and procedures, the efficient working of working memory and long term memory, the strategic use of brain resources for dynamic problem solving and multi-tasking, and the organization of ideas and perceptions for all types of output: verbal as well as non-verbal.

I’m not quite sure, off-hand, how we might teach the efficient working of memory (though they may be exercised, ala Brain Age), but I strongly support guided practice in problem-solving (which David Jonassen elegantly talks about; see his forthcoming chapter in Michael Allen’s eLearning Annual from Pfeiffer). It’s clear to me that the curriculum we need to worry about is about not passing knowledge tests (see Ken Carroll on the Chinese system).

What’s nice here is some evidence about the types of things we can and cannot do, and what the implications are for learning. I think this is relevant from K-12 to lifelong learning, and corporate learning as well. When we need to innovate and problem-solve, and I argue we do, then we better make sure we are developing the skills of individuals. Learn on!

Greater Integration

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In my elearning strategy approach, I have a step called “greater integration”. While it encompasses several steps, at core it’s about consolidating your content development and knowledge management. And the key is single-sourcing, coupled with semantics, writing once to populate multiple outputs, with structure and tags indicating what the content is in multiple ways. It’s become a theme in the content community, and is beginning to be explored in elearning as well.

The benefits are that you write less, and you get more flexibility, such as auto-populating your help systems, customer and employee training, and manuals. You also can deliver web, print, and mobile. The costs are up-front analysis and content management, which should be done anyway, and tighter constraints around elements, which requires more discipline.

XML of course helps here, and SCORM does too, but there’s another layer which adds meaning on top of the content: DITA. This allows you to define what things are and are about, which isn’t intrinsic to SCORM, and provides an elegant structure on top of XML. I’ve recognized the potential from work on Intellectricity, an adaptive learning system we built from ’99 to ’01, on a subsequent performance support system that we populated from the same content that was going into the print manual, and most recently on a project moving an organization from content development to online experience. What I didn’t have was any real evidence of it being applied to elearning content, though I know it should.

Reuben Tozman from edCetra Training spoke on the use of DITA at the DevLearn conference last month. I didn’t get to attend his session (too many interesting things at once), but I followed up with him and had a great conversation. His firm did early work on structuring content into models using DITA that got picked up on in several places and got him invited to join the OASIS DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization SC. This is a group working on developing DITA standards for elearning. He was kind enough to help clarify my understanding of DITA’s role vs SCORM (semantics vs packaging), and to mention several examples. Not surprisingly, IBM is working here, but apparently Sun is also.

What with flexible components of software systems being coupled by web services, similarly flexible content components (including media and interactivity, we’re not talking static here) can be coupled by tags and business rules to create custom/personalized/optimized content for individuals based upon roles, tasks, context, etc (see Delivering the Dream white paper, PDF). Even without the customization, however, we can stop the redundant development of content that means that sales training, customer training, and support systems are rewriting the same marketing and engineering material.

The benefits start with efficiency, but the flexibility is the real win. It requires breaking down some organizational silos, but that’s something that should be happening anyway.

I suggest we’ll see more of this in the future. I was touting games a number of years ago, and finally saw it cross the chasm into the mainstream. I’m thinking mobile’s there now. I predict that smart content will be there in maybe a year or two. Who’s ready for the future?

Climbing the expertise ladder

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Tony Karrer picked up on the Knowledge Planet + Shared Insights = Mzinga (means ‘beehive’ in Swahili) merger, and said “points to another direction – combination of LMS capability + community / social networking. I’m not sure I quite get what that means yet”. He got an explanation he liked from Dave Wilkins (KP, now Mzinga), but I have what I think is a somewhat different one.

To me, courses are at the bottom of Tony O’Driscoll’s map of the transition from novice to expertise. Communities are at the top. What I haven’t previously seen is an elegant transition between the two. I’ve argued that you really should wrap community around the courses at the bottom to support the transition from learner to participant/practitioner to expert/innovator. There are nuances about how it should be done, of course, like so much of what we do. Whether that’s in Mzinga’s direction is an open question.

Tony mentions Q2 Learning as someone else working in the space of learning and community, though while their one product meets the need of learning wrapped with community it’s not clear how that segues from there to their community product. And he cites Wilkin’s pointer to Gartner’s guess that “Enterprise social software will be the biggest new workplace technology success story of this decade.” Which resonates with my previous post about knowledge management.

I really believe that eCommunity and eLearning need to be integrated (it’s part of my eLearning strategy, after all), and I’m pleased to see some initial steps in this space, but as usual I have some specific ideas about how that should happen and I’ll be on the fence until it looks like someone’s really ‘getting’ it. Same with elearning and performance support & portals. LearningGuide seems to be doing it, but is it enough?   Eventually, you want courses, performance support, and community working together, and any two is only a partial step.

The opportunity to elegantly integrate the necessary components is sweet, but maybe loosely coupled components through web services (ala Jay Cross) will ultimately make more sense than a monolithic system. More flexibility, the ability to elegantly do each component rather than try to have a Swiss Army knife…

Knowledge marketing

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Brent Schenkler points out this connection: using web 2.0 tracking software to find out who’s commenting to whom. It’s about a company with a technology that lets you track who’s talking about what and identify the top talkers (for marketing purposes; presumably to know who to seed with information/product). Brent’s interesting point is that such technology could be used internally to track who’s talking about what within the company, and it’s a great idea. He’s talking about measuring learning outcomes but I see it more as a knowledge management tool to see who knows what.

The problem I see is that the technology first requires you to identify a topic that you want to track. Of course, you could put in a series of words or phrases of interest to the company, but how do you find what’s emergent and new in the conversations? There are KM tools that check your email to see what you know (and with ways to avoid the obvious concern about having your email checked), but your blog posts and comments, wiki edits, etc are another way to look at what you talk about (and, presumably, know).

So, a very interesting and eye-opening perspective on how we might look for who really knows what.

What did I learn about learning in 2007?

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This is the Learning Circuit‘s Blog Big Question of the Month. It caused me to go back and look at what I blogged about this past year. I talked a lot about mobile (rightly so), and of course about games, but what struck me as I read was the regular occurrence of talking about models. When I got near the beginning of the year, I found that I’d suggested that it should be the Year of the Model, so that’s it, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The point is that we don’t use conceptual/mental models enough in our learning and training (as I was just complaining in a project on training call answering). And we can. Increasingly, the power of visualization is being understood and taken advantage of. But that’s only part of the benefit. The notion of thinking in terms of systems and causal relationships is at core. I knew it before, but it’s been something I’ve been thinking about more, and wishing I had a way to work on more.

The potential benefits are big: while we might need to spend a bit more time to ensure we get the models, and communicate them, what we stand to gain are reduced time in training (fewer examples and practice needed), and what should be big wins in terms of retention and transfer, as well as flexibility to deal with situations that we didn’t anticipate.

As Karyn Romeis points out, it’s not like it’s a big new thing I learned, it’s just an increasing awareness that it’s a big untapped opportunity.

On the radio

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On Sunday I drove down to the San Francisco studios of KALW 91.7 FM here in the Bay Area to talk with Marty Nemko about simulations and games. He runs a show about workplace issues (and anything else he wants to talk about), has years of experience, and turns out is quite well known. He’d gotten interested in simulations and games, and asked me to appear to talk about the issues for the first half hour of his show. (The second half hour he answers callers and gives 3 minute ‘career makeovers’; I stuck around to listen and it’s very interesting.)

Now, I’ve been on the radio before, interviewed over the phone from Tasmania when I was living in Australia. And I’d been in a TV studio before (for reasons I can no longer recall!), and was interviewed for TV in a makeshift studio while in Colombia. But this was my first visit to a working radio studio with a live broadcast. Two guys were holding a philosophy talk show before Marty’s show, while we talked and then taped Marty’s intro for the next week.

We’d intended to have him go through simulations during the session, with him verbalizing the experience, but it didn’t work out well, so we ended up just talking about simulations. We talked through lots of issues in the half hour. You can actually listen to it as they record it and Marty makes it available (NB: it requires Real Player). It’s always strange to hear one’s voice played back.

He welcomed me to ask questions, and my main one was “what do you to keep from getting too nervous”. It’s funny, I speak alot and am usually not nervous, but for some reason the novelty of the format caused a few butterflies. His answer was insightful, about how in the end it really won’t matter. You always make mistakes and wish you said things differently but it won’t really make a difference in the bigger picture. Quite right.   I started a bit tentatively, but got going.   Also forgot it was being broadcast (and recorded) and talked with less diplomacy than would’ve been ideal.   C’est la vie.

Overall, it was quite the learning experience. It’s part of my learning strategy to push myself into new situations, and this certainly qualified! Interestingly, too often we forget our old technologies in the excitement of new ones (people seem to forget about discussion boards, but they’re great for certain types of eCommunity, as is happening with ITFORUM). Radio’s a case in point, as we know from podcasts sometimes audio is a great channel.

more mobile moves

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And the news just keeps on coming. Of the “well yeah” variety, ATT has announced that the next generation 3G-capable iPhone (which currently runs on the not-latest/fastest approach, EDGE) will come in ’08. Steve Jobs, Apple’s head honcho, promised late ’08, but the ATT announcement was without that qualifier (hope someone didn’t get in trouble for that :). Sooner is better here, with everyone making technology leaps every few months.

The more interesting news is that Verizon has announced that their next generation technology will be LTE (Long Term Evolution, a 4th generation of mobile phone technology). The reason this is interesting is that LTE is GSM, not CDMA. In case this is acronym soup to you, let me explain it practically. Currently in the US, there are two competing standards, CDMA (Sprint and Verizon to date) and GSM (ATT and T-Mobile). This is unlike most of the world, which runs on GSM. If Verizon moves to GSM, that will leave Sprint alone, which probably won’t be a good place to be.

They also used to not play well together, even on the same technology. With Verizon’s other recent announcement of opening their standards to allow phones they don’t control to play on their network, and Google’s announcement of their Open Handset Alliance and the Android standard, we’re really changing the market for mobile.

Despite the disadvantages that the US mobile market has had between the proprietary approaches, we’ve had cheap data. If we also get broad coverage, high speed networks, and an open playing field to supplement that opportunity, mobile could really take a quantum leap in capability and consequently in opportunity.

The US has a real chance here to become a mobile trend-setter instead of a laggard over the course of a few years, and the pressure will be on other countries to start freeing up data bandwidth as well. The winner should be the consumer. Of course, it will still take time to play out, and who knows what sorts of other barriers they’ll try to put in, but there’s reason for optimism, and for innovative ideas to have a better chance to come to fruition. Fingers crossed….